The Yamaha Reface CP is a 37-key digital E-Piano which emulates a wide variety of electric pianos with onboard effects and a bevy of features. It sounds great. It also has basically every port you need to make it work with your workflow too (except CV).
There are many mixed reviews on this keyboard, but I feel the newest firmware shores up the issue of many of the previous negative reviews. MIDI was a complete mess until the 1.30 firmware. There are still some other caveats with other parts of it, but I feel it’s a great add to a studio with the newer firmware. Let’s go over the specifics of the keyboard and whether it’s right or not for you.
The Hardware
The Yamaha Reface CP is a spectacular digital E-Piano. It has stereo out via 1/4″ mono jacks and can take a sustain pedal, it has a MIDI breakout into 2 standard 5 pin MIDI ports, it has onboard effects, and it has USB. For the price, it is a beast. It also supports 128 note polyphony and even has onboard speakers. The hardware build quality is great and feels extremely solid.
It includes a volume fader, an octave fader, 6 different electric piano types (2 Rhodes, 1 Wurlitzer, 1 Clavinet, 1 toy piano, and the Yamaha CP), overdrive, and an effects stack. The effects are ordered as tremolo or wah, chorus or phaser, digital or analog delay, and reverb. They can be turned off as well. Each includes a depth, and the tremolo, wah, chorus, phaser, and delays include a time modifier (depth, speed, time).
The Yamaha Reface CP includes a 37 key keyboard as well to make it practical to play on. You can’t really play a full piano piece on it, but you can definitely make some cool stuff with it. The keys are great quality and are very velocity sensitive (this can be arguably to the point of being frustrating though).
What It Does Well
If you want a configurable electric piano sound, this is your purchase. Each E-Piano sound is great and the onboard effects are extremely good. It offers every essential port to make true use of it as an electric piano as well.
The build quality is great, and it’s made to be portable. You have onboard speakers if you don’t want to hook it into anything. You also have a full effects stack which is highly configurable and fills out basically every need. Everything you see on the unit is great, but the caveats all lie under the hood. If you plan to just hit keys and like the keys on it without plugging in, this is probably the exact thing you want. It’s also easy to sequence with the newer firmware which makes it a powerful tool.
What It’s Lacking
Despite this being a really solid electric piano, the keys are a little stiff in my opinion. It’s easy to throw an external keyboard on, and the speaker feels like it has a bit of compression or normalization compared to playing it through my mixer. I can definitely hear the fine differences in velocity on each instrument type (which rules out minor bugs with a given instrument) in excess when jacked in.
A normal piano has a bit of give on the keys which leads to the weighted feel, but this lacks any of the weight. These are synth keys by design. The velocity doesn’t really follow the pattern I expect off of a piano though. It’s easy to get close to where I want for velocity, but hard to get exactly where I want. I’ve heard from pianists that the keys are great and responsive, and I’ll be honest, I’m not really a good keyboardist or pianist.
I also notice some flukes with the builtin keys for response (like a soft hit being a bit loud), but this does not appear to be common from the others I’ve played around on. My complaints may all be based off of my unit being a little off standard. Feel free to comment if you have a difference experience here.
MIDI
Unless you get a newer unit which includes the 1.30 firmware update, the MIDI on this unit is complete trash. It works, but is useless for sequencing. It defaults to an omni mode (where it listens to MIDI on all channels) which needs to be reset every boot on older firmware revisions. That is if you can get it to work; I had no such luck.
I had honestly resolved to just sell the thing until I found out about the newer firmware. The newer 1.30 firmware solves all of these issues though. Since I upgraded it, I’ve had literally no issues with the unit.
The newer firmware makes MIDI configurable from the advanced setup mode, allows you to save settings, and breathes new life into this unit. Upgrading the firmware is also completely trivial to do. I had previously only used it to play live with, but I wanted to use it for backing sounds in certain songs and was unable due to the MIDI. 1.30 came a bit late and the price has continually dropped on this unit, but now it’s way cheaper and way better than when I bought it.
I have not tested the MIDI Out on it (and unless it’s a mislabeled Thru, I literally can’t think of why I would bother), but MIDI In works flawlessly with an Elektron Digitakt.
Is It Worth It?
If you want an E-Piano and have a USB cable, this is one of the best on the market. It can be extremely variable for its sound and is extremely configurable. You really don’t need to add much to it to make it sound good with the onboard effects. I run it through my mixer’s send to make the reverb consistent with the rest of my track, but otherwise I haven’t even considered adding anything to it.
If you want a classic 70’s to 80’s electric piano sound and you don’t want to need to worry with effects and other things, this is what you want. If you upgrade it, it’s a great add to a studio or a sequenced rig. It had its issues, but Yamaha appears to have worked most of them out of it in the latest firmware. You may want to partner it with an external keyboard for more range and better quality of keys.
Get one here.